The Amazing Adventures of Geek Girl

The Project Opportunity for Microsoft Partners

tara-jade — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:00:00 GMT

Kevin Lief and Tara Hellier discuss the opportunities for Microsoft partners to add Microsoft Project to their customer solution offerings.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Download the slides.

Cloud Computing… New?? We’ve been doing this for years! :-)

tara-jade — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:17:51 GMT

Everyone (myself included) is hailing (gotta love those cloud-based puns!) cloud computing as the new IT revolution. While it’s true that the term ‘cloud’ is relatively new, the concept of cloud computing (subscribing to or accessing software hosted in a vendor’s data centre) has been around for many years, particularly commercial offerings, and Microsoft have a very strong story to tell. We’ve been doing this for years, particularly in the form of Windows Live, Hotmail and MSN. See the image below for some key facts:

The Cloud Opportunity For Partners

tara-jade — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:31:54 GMT

The cloud is going to involve massive change, for Microsoft, customers and partners. If partners are willing to embrace this change and evolve their business models to work with the new cloud based offerings, there’s massive opportunity.

Expanding your reach

Cloud computing from Microsoft can provide opportunities to reach new customers – we expect almost three-quarters of sales to be to new customers. It may also allow you to target new verticals or types of business, particularly in the SMB space. We also have cloud-based offerings such as the deskless worker suite available via BPOS which brings technology access (to email and SharePoint sites) to workers who would previously had none.

Growing your revenue

There a two key methods for partners to grow their revenue with Microsoft cloud services – recurring subscription revenues and additional consulting, migration and integration services. When partners are associated with a BPOS deal, they receive an initial payment 12% of the purchase, plus 6% of on-going subscription fees. (There are different fees for other partners, such as BPOS resellers.) These fees are effectively new for SI partners, who previously made very little or nothing on licence sales. As well as this, partners can still offer their consulting, integration, configuration and migration services, in a similar manner to on-premise deployments. But be warned, migration opportunities are unlikely to exist forever – partners should skill up on cloud migration now so they have the capabilities to help early adopters.

Increase your capacity

Microsoft’s Cloud Computing offerings allow customers to get started with the latest technology very quickly and reduces the length of the sales cycle. From a partner perspective, this means you may be able to close more sales per year without increasing headcount. Deployment times will also be reduced, again freeing up your technical resources to complete more deployments per year. We expect cloud partners to complete deals faster and more frequently.

As you can see, there is a lot of opportunity for partners who embrace the cloud – particularly now as customers are looking to move some or all of their technology off-premise. Taking full advantage of these opportunities will take some flexibility and adaption from a partner (and Microsoft) perspective, but there’s definite value to the disruption.

For all types of partners, there are many resources available explaining the value of Microsoft’s cloud services. i would recommend looking at the content on https://www.quickstartonlineservices.com/ (MPN login required) – lots of fantastic guides and documentation.

It’s Been A While…

tara-jade — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:14:45 GMT

Hello again everyone. Apologies for the recent radio silence; however the Wave 2010 launch of products has kept me (and hopefully you!) extremely busy!

There’s been a lot happening at Microsoft over the last few months. Back in November, we announced public betas of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010. These have been hugely successful, and we’ve had fantastic feedback on the products.

2010 Timeline

In mid-April, we announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of the Wave 2010 products, and on May 12th we had our worldwide launch to business customers. The 2010 launch was entirely virtual and delivered over the Internet, in-keeping with our new strategy and focus (more on that to come in later posts…).

From a worldwide perspective, Stephen Elop delivered the launch keynote, which contained some great information on the products, and conversations with some key customers who are already using the 2010 solutions. If you didn’t get a chance to watch this live, I would highly recommend watching it on-demand and also looking at the additional videos on the site.

We also had a UK launch on the same day, presented by Gordon Frazer and Scott Dodds. This featured some great UK case studies, with interviews from both customers and partners. Again, this can be viewed on-demand.

2010 Demos

Now that we’ve officially launched, it’s time for you as partners to start delivering amazing 2010 demos to your customers. Being lovely people, we’ve released a 2010 Virtual Machine image that you can use to get started :)

The 2010 Information Worker (IW) demo VM can be downloaded here. This VM comes with Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, FAST, Project Server 2010 and Visio 2010 pre-installed. There are also 200 demo users and lots of content included, to make it easy for you to quickly get a demo environment up and running. For the Project partners out there, there’s a separate Project 2010 content pack, that will add lots of Project content straight into this VM.

These VMs are built for use with Hyper-V. (They won’t work with Virtual PC/ Virtual Server as they’re x64). Hyper-V is a role within Windows Server 2008 R2 which allows x64 virtualisation. Full instructions about how to import the VM into Hyper-V can be found on the download pages.

One very important thing to note is the hardware specification required to run these VMs. The hardware requirements for the various 2010 solutions can be found on Technet. In particular, SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010 recommend a quad core x64 processor and 8Gb RAM. To run a demo VM, you can get away with slightly lower specs (not at all recommended for any production servers!). I currently have a 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 8Gb RAM in total (of which I assign around 6.5Gb to the VM). It’s not lightning fast performance, it’s just about good enough for demos. If it’s feasible, I’d suggest running the VM from a solid state HDD, and remember to cache all of your sites before starting any demo!

I’m happy to help partners get their 2010 demos working – if you need any assistance, let me know!

Happy demoing! :)

A Cloud On The Horizon

tara-jade — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:14:27 GMT

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion at Microsoft around Cloud Computing. Cloud computing, the consumption of technology services over the Internet, has been an industry ‘hot topic’ for some time now. At Microsoft, we believe this is absolutely the future of computing, and we’re all in.

In early March, Steve Ballmer gave a presentation on our strategy for cloud computing. He made it very clear the cloud computing will completely reshape the IT industry as a whole, and that Microsoft will be making some big changes in order to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity. As a Microsoft partner, I would encourage you to read/ watch/ learn all that you can on our cloud computing strategy, as it provides so much opportunity for partners if you’re flexible and willing to adapt to this change.

What is ‘Cloud Computing’?

The term ‘cloud computing’ has been around for a little while, but it can be confusing (especially for customers). In my opinion, the easiest way to explain it is to use the analogy of the electricity grid. The National Grid has an infrastructure which allows it to produce and distribute electricity. As a consumer, I pay to consume this service (in general, I pay for the amount I use, or I pay a set monthly fee). I don’t need to worry about who manages the electricity, or how it’s created – all I need to know is when I want to use some electricity, it’s available to me. Cloud computing works in a similar fashion – a company such as Microsoft has the infrastructure (in this case, a datacentre) to provide customers with computing services delivered over the Internet. Customers don’t need to install/ manage/ secure/ maintain hardware or software – they can simply consume the software when and how they wish. Cloud computing services have been around for a while (think Hotmail, XBOX Live service etc) – they now have a brand.

Revolution

We really believe cloud computing is the new revolution in the IT industry. Cloud computing provides so many benefits to customers, including:

- Paying for what is used

- More predictable and in most cases lower costs

- A shift from Capex to Opex

- No patching or maintenance required

- Faster deployment of the latest technologies

- Robust, multi-layered security

- Financially backed SLA

- Anywhere access for users

We’re not the only ones who believe cloud computing will be huge – Gartner predict that by 2012, 80% of Fortune 1000 companies will use some form of cloud computing service, and 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.

Now is the time to talk to your customers about the value of the cloud, and to think about how cloud services will affect your business. My next post will discuss the benefits of the cloud for partners.

We’re all in… are you?

Project Server 2010 Partner Sales Readiness Day- 6th April 2010

tara-jade — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:34:57 GMT

Internet Facing SharePoint 2010 Beta Website

tara-jade — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:32:30 GMT

Brightstarr, a Microsoft partner, now have their public facing website running on SharePoint Server 2010 beta!

Take a look at their website to see how slick 2010 is (and this is only the beta software!). I particularly like the fact that most of the website is rich media (now far more easy to work with in SharePoint Server 2010 due to new features such as the Digital Asset Library and the out-of-the-box Media Web Part).

If anyone knows of any other websites running on SharePoint Server 2010 please let me know!

SharePoint 2010 Training in London – Register Now

tara-jade — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:26:22 GMT

One of Microsoft’s training partners is offering SharePoint Server 2010 training. See the information below for full details and registration link.

SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference

19^th – 21^st April 2010 – London, UK

This 3 day SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference consists of over 70 Sessions dedicated to IT Pro’s/Developers/Designers/Information Workers/Business Adoption and Power Users and with a new Deep Dive 400 track and 5th Power User Track added this is set to be Europe’s Premier SharePoint Conference for 2010!

Why you should attend the SharePoint Evolution Conference...

1. The conference is dedicated to SharePoint

2. Born from the very successful Best Practices conference in 2009 hailed by many as the best SharePoint conference ever.

3. Sessions list second to none, speaker list second to none.

4. 55 Expert SharePoint speakers from Microsoft and well known companies. Never before has such a group of talented speakers like this been brought together.

5. 75 breakout sessions all being recorded and post conference DVD sent out afterwards. 90 sessions including the community track !!

6. The Conference is in April 2010 it won’t just be a re-hash of the SharePoint Conference from Las Vegas in 2009. There will be lots of new content with new things to show.

7. Session tracks for all from IT Pro’s, Developers, End Users to Business and project managers. 6 tracks in total.

8. Appeals to all verticals including education, government and local councils.

9. Just Announced – A new 6th Track for the SharePoint Community – Speakers from the community presenting real world SharePoint scenarios. New for 2010

10. Ask the experts panel – Get a chance to see the best in business in one panel to try and stump with a question.

11. Only £695 for the three, days bulk discount available for multiple tickets.

12. Prize draw giveaway every week to win prizes for people registering.

13. Great hotel deals and easy to reach from anywhere in the World.

14. Great Exhibitor hall with the top SharePoint vendors to interact with.

15. Fantastic Conference Party – New for 2010

16. Exhibitor evening and SharePoint event in Central London

New Community Track

This track has sessions for all verticals and will include speakers from all types of companies who have implemented SharePoint and what they learnt by doing so. All speakers are actively engaged in the SharePoint community and user group and have a wealth of knowledge to share.

To register: www.sharepointevolutionconference.com

Project 2010 Forums now Live

tara-jade — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:20:15 GMT

Microsoft Project 2010 has now 4 public forums –

If you have a question on Project 2010 – you are welcome to refer to and discuss in this forum. Moderators are the top Project 2010 Subject Matter Experts from Microsoft, including Program Managers and Engineers and Project Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs)!

Project Server 2010

Project Server 2010 General Questions and Answers

General questions, comments and discussions on Project Server 2010.

Project Server 2010 - Setup, Upgrade, Administration and Operation

Discuss setup, upgrade & migration, administration and operation for Project Server 2010.

Project 2010 Customization and Programming

Discuss customizations and programming for Project Web Access 2010, Project Server 2010, Project Professional 2010 and Project Standard 2010. Includes User Interface (UI) customizations, Project Server Interface (PSI) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Programming.

Project Professional 2010

Project Professional 2010 General Questions and Answers

General questions, comments and discussions on Project Professional 2010.

All 4 could be accessed via the following TechNet and MSDN links (both point to the SAME forums with the SAME content but with different look and feel):

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectserver2010,projectprofessional2010/

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/projectserver2010,projectprofessional2010/

Related Project 2010 Resources:

· Project 2010 TechCenter @ TechNet - http://technet.microsoft.com/projectserver/

· Project 2010 Developer Centre @ MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/project/

· General Project 2010 Information - http://www.microsoft.com/project/2010/

2010 Virtual Machines now available!

tara-jade — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:17:12 GMT

The moment you (and I) have all been waiting for….

I’m very pleased to tell you all that virtual machines are now available for both SharePoint Server 2010 and Project Server 2010.

Partners can use these virtual machines as the basis for their to-customer pre-sales demos.

Remember that the 2010 server solutions are 64-bit only, so won’t run on Virtual PC (as this only supports 32-bit). Instead you’ll need to use Hyper-V, a fantastic feature of Windows Server 2008. The setup is reasonably straightforward and should be documented in the download files; however watch this space for a full blog post on setting up Hyper-V VMs for SharePoint Server 2008 and Project Server 2008.

It’s also worth being aware of the system requirements for the 2010 servers – we recommend at least 4Gb RAM available for evaluation and 8Gb for production use. (Personally, I think at least 6Gb is necessary to run a VM). Make sure your machine is capable of running these VMs to a high standard – slow, poorly performing demos never work well!

Download links below:

SharePoint Server 2010 VM

SharePoint Server 2010 System Requirements

Project Server 2010 VM

Project Server 2010 System Requirements

These VMs are a great resource for partners – they come pre-populated with data and pre-configured. They make a great starting point for building your own, custom demos to present to customers.

Obviously it’s still vital for SI partners to fully understand the full installation process for the technologies (which you can explore using the beta and evaluation copies of Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008).